Rorke Denver spent 14 years in the Navy SEALs. He was part of 200 missions and earned a Bronze Star. In his last four years, he was in charge of training.

His just-released book, “Damn Few,” is a look not just at the shadowy battlefields of the special forces, but also at the psychology involved in creating the people who are physically and mentally tough enough to do the work.

Rorke was one of the real-life SEALs featured in the 2012 movie “Act of Valor.” He lives in San Diego. He’ll be at Warwick’s on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. for a reading and signing.

Q: Are SEALs born or made?

A: I hate to give the political answer, but I think it’s a little of both. If you can take the abuse and you can physically get through the course, it really comes down to what’s in your head and your heart. To me, the thing that’s always so interesting about the training is you’ll have a guy who shows up that’s cut out of marble, he looks like a Greek god, he’s a top swimmer, he’s an elite runner, every tool you can possibly have, and he’ll hit that cold ocean water on day two and he’ll quit. And then right next to him will be a kid from Nebraska, a little pudgy, he’s never seen the ocean, he taught himself to swim two weeks before, and we couldn’t stop that guy with a nuclear weapon. So it really comes down to what’s inside you.

Q: Tell me about van brawls.

A: This is a story I shared in the book to highlight the differences between our culture and the regular world. We just have a very aggressive and charged-up group of guys, and sometimes when we are in a 15-person van traveling to one of our training missions, you get everybody packed in there with too much energy and too much testosterone, sooner of later the boys are gonna play.

At any given time, if someone calls out “van brawl,” it turns into basically a full-contact, no-holds-barred fight. Sometimes teams form, sometimes it’s every man for himself, and the only rule of a van brawl is you cannot impede the driver. Our guys want to be in the fight. They’re aggressive. It’s healthy in many ways for SEALs when there’s actual combat because we get to focus those energies.

Q: I was imagining myself driving down a freeway right next to one of those vans.

A: It would be quite a scene.

Q: There have been quite a few books out about the SEALs recently. Why did you write yours?

A: A book launched my career. I started in the Navy because I was reading Winston Churchill in my senior year of college and it really was a call to serve. If this book does that for any young lion thinking about coming into the brotherhood, that would be a great result.

I also believe the current narrative of popular books, stories and movies about the SEALs is incomplete. It talks specifically to an individual operator or an individual team that has made some big headlines. “Damn Few” talks a lot about the rest of the story: how we select SEALs, how we train SEALs, how we deploy them to war and bring them back, the family connections that go along with being a SEAL, and the way we think about our jobs.